European Culture - 16th Century

Chopines

Chopines (sha-PEENS), shoes with very tall wooden or cork platform soles,
inspired what some consider the first clothing fad. During the High
Renaissance of the sixteenth century, fashionable, wealthy women in
Venice, Italy, eagerly climbed into these shoes that ranged from six to
twenty-four inches in height. Feet were secured to the pedestals with
straps of leather or uppers (the part of a shoe above the sole) made of
silk or other fabric. The tops of chopines were rarely seen; the shoes
were more valued for their height and for the dainty stride they required
of wearers. Towering on their shoes in glamorous long gowns, women who
wore chopines needed the support of their husbands or maids to hobble the
streets and royal courts of Venice.
Chopines made Italian women "half flesh, half wood,"
remarked traveler John Evelyn in his diary of 1666, as quoted in
The Book of Costume.

The craze for chopines in Italy coincided with the peak of attraction for
extravagant dress during the 1500s, when almost every article of clothing
was highly exaggerated. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
century, Spanish, French, and Swiss women were also teetering fashionably
on chopines. The fad never reached northern Europe.

Chopines were not an Italian invention. The shoes signaled the
establishment of trade between Venetian merchants and the Near East, or
southwest Asia. Although the true origins of chopines is not known, the
tall clogs Turkish women wore in bathhouses or the pedestal shoes worn by
actors on Greek stages in early history may have been the inspiration for
chopines. Chopines were used by the Manchus (people native to Manchuria
who ruled China from 1644 to 1912) in China in the mid-1600s as a less
painful alternative to the deforming effects of foot binding that had been
practiced since the tenth century. (Foot binding was a common practice in
China whereby young women and girls would bind their feet so as to make
them stop growing.) The pedestals of Chinese chopines were much slimmer
than those developed in Venice, offering women a footprint similar to that
of bound feet and giving them the same difficulty walking.

Although enjoyed for their glamorous, fashionable effect, chopines were
considered by some observers as tools to keep women in the home, to keep
them from wandering, going astray morally. Indeed, this was the purpose of
the foot binding that chopines replaced in China, and chopines did make
walking a slow and difficult task. In Italy clergymen regarded the wearing
of chopines as particularly admirable because the shoes inhibited the
wearer from indulging in morally dangerous pleasures such as dance.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Contini, Mila.
Fashion: From Ancient Egypt to the Present Day.
Edited by James Laver. New York: Odyssey Press, 1965.

Cosgrave, Bronwyn.
The Complete History of Costume and Fashion: From Ancient Egypt to the
Present Day.
New York: Checkmark Books, 2000.